


something rare and beautiful

by echoesofstardust



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Romance, The Notebook AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-30
Updated: 2017-01-30
Packaged: 2018-09-20 19:45:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9510152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/echoesofstardust/pseuds/echoesofstardust
Summary: “Hey, Lydia!” He had called. “This is the one I gotta use!” He was in front of shelves of stationery. In his hands was a notebook with stripes of orange and blue. There are some things that you wouldn’t think would make a good combination that turn out to be the perfect combination.There are some things that you wouldn’t expect to happen, but do.A Stydia The Notebook AU





	

**Author's Note:**

> Guide to formatting
> 
> Normal text: Present Day
> 
> Italicised text: Memories
> 
> Indented text: What is written in the notebook

>   _“We fell in love, despite our differences, and once we did, **something rare and beautiful** was created. For me, love like that has only happened once, and that's why every minute we spent together has been seared in my memory. I'll never forget a single moment of it.”_
> 
> _ \- The Notebook, Nicholas Sparks - _

 

He sits slowly in the green padded armchair across from her, eyes twinkling although she knows his back is giving him problems again.

“Hello.”

“Hello.”

“It’s a beautiful morning, isn’t it? The sun’s up and bright and there’s not a cloud in the sky…” Even until now, he still rambles. The years they’ve spent together stretch between them like the distance from here to the horizon. Her fingers flex around the weathered orange and blue notebook in her hands.

 

_“Hey, Lydia!” He had called. “This is the one I gotta use!” He was in front of shelves of stationery. In his hands was a notebook with stripes of orange and blue. There are some things that you wouldn’t think would make a good combination that turn out to be the perfect combination._

_There are some things that you wouldn’t expect to happen, but do._

 

“…But it’s not as beautiful as my wife.” Lydia holds her breath. 

One,  

two, 

three. 

“Where is she?” _Where is she? She’s not you._

She’s

not

you.

 

_She had gripped his hand tightly, his thumb tracing circles at the juncture of her index finger and thumb. “We’ll get through this, Lyds, whatever happens,” he had said, kissing her temple. It’s almost as if she was the one about to have a diagnosis at the doctor’s. Not him._

_The doctor came in the room and sat down. Lydia studied his body language. Stiff posture, frown, pursed lips, no eye contact. Nothing should come as a shock.  
_

_“Mr Stilinski, you have been diagnosed with dementia.”_

_The scream that escapes her lips echoes in the quiet room._

 

She smiles at him, feels the corners of her lips tug upwards, but inside she wants to cry. “Maybe—“ she clears her throat “—maybe, she’ll come by later.”

He nods, still smiling.

“In the meantime, do you want to hear a story?”

“It depends.” He pauses to think, shifting back in his chair. “Does it have a happy ending?”

Lydia smiles. The sun peers out from behind a cluster of clouds. “I don’t know, I haven’t finished it yet.”

“How does it begin?” He asks. Lydia thumbs through the familiar pages, perusing the dog-eared ones.

“This story has a lot of beginnings,” she says. He places a warm hand on top of hers. She stills.

“Then pick one.” The timbre of his voice carries lightly in the early morning air. 

 

> There was a girl and a boy. She had hair the colour of strawberries and he had eyes the colour of whisky. It is easy to say that their story began on the first day of third grade. But really, it began when the universe first formed, when the stars were birthed, when atoms combined. It began when the galaxies threaded together out of the dust of stars.
> 
> The first time they met was on a swing. The seats were red, and so was her dress. Her dress was adorned with a bow, and so was her hair.
> 
> “Hello.” He said.
> 
> “Hello.” She replied, slowing the swing. Her shiny black shoes scuff against the grass. “My name’s Lydia.” She stuck out a hand, confident, even then.
> 
> “My name’s Stiles.” He reached out to clasp his hand with hers. In that moment, galaxies collided and the universe sighed. In that moment, Stiles and Lydia became friends. 

 

“I like this Stiles and Lydia.” He tapped a finger on his chin. “I think they’ll become best friends who’ll fall in love.” He catches the attention of a nurse and asks for a cup of coffee.

The nurse turns to her. “For you? Anything?” She smiles and shakes her head.

The nurse brings the cup over, bringing two packets of sugar. He tears one open, pours all its contents in the coffee. He tears the other one, and pours half the packet. He takes the spoon and stirs it counter-clockwise.

“What happens next?”

 

> Stiles thinks he fell in love with Lydia on the second day of third grade. (She wasn’t there on the first.) He remembers looking at the doorway, looking for her familiar halo of strawberry blonde hair. When she finally walked in through the door, sniffling and tired-eyed, he remembers breathing a sigh of relief. In that sigh, his young heart had already fallen.
> 
> A goddess had stolen young Stiles’ heart without knowing.
> 
> Although, perhaps ‘stolen’ was not the right word, if it was willingly given.

 

_“Stiles! Stop! Oh, God, please, Stiles! Stop!” Lydia laughed as Stiles ran his fingers up her waist and down her thighs._

_“Not gonna, not gonna,” he grins, barely an inch from her face. “Not until you agree to watch Star Wars with me,” he singsongs._

_“Okay, okay, okay!” she wheezed. “I will!”_

_“Yes!” Stiles pumped his fists, reaching over Lydia to reach the remote. Lydia laughed as he enthusiastically clicked play. As she curled into his side, she hoped that she would never have to live a life where she was not with him._

 

> Maybe they weren’t the closest of friends through elementary and middle school. But each rare smile shared between them was like a piece of sunlight that Stiles tucked into his heart, like a jar of fireflies collected on a warm summer evening.
> 
> As they grew older and their lives took separate turns. Lydia up, towards the stars, and Stiles, remained where mere mortals stayed to admire the sky above them.
> 
> It was not until sophomore year that their story gained pace. Finally, finally, Stiles was on Lydia’s radar. 

 

She stops here. She bites her lip and suppresses the sob that threatens to spill out of her lips. She always did at this part, when she was reminded of a time when she consciously overlooked him, ignored the boy who gazed on her adoringly since the first day on the swings.

She takes deep breaths.

One,

Two,

Three.

“Stiles wrote this, didn’t he?” He asks gently. When she looks up, he looks at her with a sympathetic smile. 

“Yeah, yeah, he did.”

 “And he loved Lydia very much?” God, she was actually going to cry now. She blinks.

One,

Two,

Three.

“Yes, very much.” 

 

> She noticed him because his best friend was in love with her best friend. She saw him as a weird, awkward, spastic kid, who she barely spared a glance. With her lipstick and her heels, she built a facade of ice and queen and bitch.

 

“Wait, wait, wait.” He takes the notebook from her hands. “Ah, thought so. The girl wrote this?” He turns the notebook to face her and points to the loopy handwriting.

“Yes, she actually wrote parts of this story.” She nods. “How did you guess?”

“Ah, that was easy. You’ve only read a paragraph but that boy would never have seen this girl he loved like that.” He chuckles. “That girl saw herself like that, but I bet she wasn’t like that at all. I know,” he taps the side of his nose, “my girl was like that.”

_Yes,_ she thinks, _Yes, she was._

She turns her attention back to the notebook. She hopes the tightening in her chest would release. 

 

> But Stiles knew the truth behind Lydia’s steel-strong facade. For years he watched. He listened. He remembered. He saw how she bit her lip and crossed her ankles every time the teacher asked a question and she knew the answer but she wanted others to think she wasn’t intelligent. Every time Stiles saw this, he wanted to tell her that she shouldn’t hide how smart she is. But each time he reached out to tap her on the shoulder, she would flick her hair and stalk away, always two steps ahead of him.
> 
> But then sophomore year came. This was the year that changed Stiles’ life, and ultimately Lydia’s as well. Evil people and monstrous creatures came into town that changed Scott, Stiles’ best friend. Stiles and Scott suddenly needed to be the good guys that saved their town.
> 
> Sophomore year was eventually the year that Stiles made it on Lydia’s radar. Scott started dating Lydia’s best friend, Allison. Lydia began to sit with them at lunch, watched their lacrosse games. Maybe it was because Allison was dating Scott, but Stiles happily ignored this fact.

 

“Lydia wrote this next bit.” She murmurs.

 

> The winter formal was when Lydia finally saw Stiles as more than a spastic, overeager kid. She saw someone who saw beyond her facade, someone who saw her intelligence and her dream of becoming a Fields Medallist. 
> 
> Not the Nobel Prize, as she reminded Stiles. There’s no Nobel Prize for mathematics.
> 
> She let him take him out on the dance floor, under the bright pink and blue lights. Perhaps it was a little bit stiff and awkward at first, but once she slid her hands up to his shoulders, firmer and broader than what she expected, and he placed his palms on her waist, somehow they fit.
> 
> If she had been brave enough to admit it, she would have realised that it scared her how it felt so right.

 

_“You look beautiful, Lyds,” Stiles whispered in the curve of her ear as they danced for the first time as husband and wife._

_“You clean up nice yourself,” Lydia murmurs back, cheekily grinning. “And I already knew that, Mr Stilinski.”_

_Stiles twirls Lydia, somehow managing not to step on her feet. “But you know how much I like to remind you,” he dips her gently, “Mrs Stilinski.”_

 

> Junior year brought them closer. More bad guys came into town and there were more mysteries to solve. The two of them formed a partnership that figured out all that they needed to know. 
> 
> One of the lowest points for Stiles was when his dad was in danger. The panic attacks that started after his mother’s illness and that he thought ended years ago come back. One hits him in the middle of the school hallway. The world tilted as he gasped and his vision blurred. Lydia dragged him to the boy’s locker room. She tried to calm him with thoughts of friends and family. (Bad idea.) She tried to get him to calm his breathing.
> 
> But his face stayed twisted in pain, and his breaths remained laboured. So she pressed her lips against his. Never in a million years, a thousand centuries, would Stiles have thought that this could actually happen.
> 
> She said that she had read somewhere that holding your breath would stop a panic attack. And that when she kissed him he held his breath.
> 
> The way he looked at her then would be forever imprinted on her inside of her eyelids, a gaze of adoration and awe and something else that had settled in her chest, just a little off-centre, that pulsed with every beat of her heart. Something that she saw every time she closed her eyes.

 

She had to stop reading again. To be reminded of a time when she was starting to _feel_ something for the boy with constellations mapped on his face, who had become one of her best friends, but that she didn’t do anything about it.

Tears push at the edges of her eyes again, but she blinks to stop them from falling.

“So, Lydia likes Stiles too?” She looks up to see him smiling conspiratorially at her.

_Yes, she does._ “Perhaps, but I don’t think she hasn’t realised it yet.”

“Hmm.” He taps his finger against his chin. “But this Stiles is willing to wait. I’m sure of it.”

She might actually cry this time.

_Stiles woke up to the sound of Lydia crying. “Lyds, what’s wrong?” He quickly propped himself up and cradled her closer to his chest._

_Lydia whimpered and turned to face him. “Stiles, I—I’m scared.”_

 

_Stiles ran his thumbs across her cheekbones and kissed her forehead. “What of?” His mind ran through possibilities. The monsters under their bed usually turned out to be real._

_“I don’t know if I—if I could ever—Stiles, I—” Stiles rubbed comforting circles on her back, “I want to marry you someday.”_

_Stiles smiles. “Oh, Lyds. You already know this, but I want to marry you someday too.”_

_A sob escapes Lydia. “But I—I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready.” She buries her head into his chest._

_He wraps his arms around her and runs his fingers through her hair. “I’m willing to wait. For as long as you want me to.”_

 

> There was an evening of red yarn and a green marker, spent in his bedroom with her lying on his bed. Drawings of trees, nogitsunes, a pair of arms in plaid that enveloped her as she saw the boy she cared for die.
> 
> Lydia lost her best friend that year. The world lost a star, heaven reclaimed an angel. For the first time she felt truly lost, scrambling to hold onto a ledge that had already crumbled.
> 
> In a way, she lost Stiles that year too. Not in a permanent way, because Death did not sweep in with his steel scythe and steal his life. But, for the first time, it seemed that someone had stolen his heart from Lydia’s unguarded palm. 
> 
> It would be easy to blame him for leaving her alone, or for the girl who his eyes traced now, or the impossible forces of the universe.
> 
> But she didn’t. Instead she blamed herself.

 

“She shouldn’t have, you know.” He speaks with a quiet, thoughtful tone.

Her head snaps up, as quickly as her age-weary bones would allow. “Lydia shouldn’t have blamed herself?”

“No.” His eyes hold a challenge, one that she picks up as soon as he sets it down, a habit unforgotten from years of similar situations.

An angry cry spills from her throat. “Why shouldn’t she have? It was her fault that she missed her chance then with Stiles! She was too selfish to consider that maybe one day, what she thought of as always and eternally hers would one day dis—disappear!”

She does not know where those words came from.

Actually, maybe she does. Those words grew from pain felt by her then, and from the pain felt by her now, as the soul she knew was entwined with hers now does not recognise her. Those words grew in the holes left by stolen memories and in the wide chasm left by a thieved love. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, after a few seconds. “I—I don’t know what came over me.”

Ever so understanding and gentle, he smiles. “It’s okay.” 

She clears her throat. “Anyway, uh, Stiles wrote these next pages.”

 

> Stiles and Lydia grew distant, yes, but they grew back together. Maybe they were tied by an invisible string that stretched infinitely but always guided them to each other.
> 
> Stiles liked to think of this string as red, the exact shade Lydia’s hair when it burned bright in the sun. (Because any other time it would clearly be strawberry blonde.)
> 
> He remembered a glass wall dividing them, of him desperately pleading for a cruel man to not hurt Lydia. He remembered pressing up against another wall, with Lydia cradled as close to his chest as possible, to ensure that they would not be seen by the villains of their story.
> 
> But there comes a time when the darkness steals the light. There came a time when Stiles was not able to protect Lydia from the monsters who wanted the power she carried within her.
> 
> While she was comatose, he had sat beside her bed and gripped her small hand in his, which had still held warmth. As long as her hands remained warm, the flame of hope in his chest continued to burn, the hope that she would come back to, not only him, but everyone else who loved her.
> 
> When she was trapped by the monsters and his being a human could barely help to save her, this was probably the most terrifying moment of his life. It pained that the girl he loved was in danger; it choked him that there was little he was capable of doing to save her.
> 
> But he found the strength in his love for her. He found courage in the absolute certainty that she would be saved, even if it cost his own life. He found hope in how human he was, how nothing about him has changed, least of all his love for Lydia.
> 
> The moment he burst through the doors after the pack had strategised to save Lydia was, in contrast, one of the happiest moments that he could remember. Finally, he could see her, touch her, save her.
> 
> Because they were Stiles and Lydia, and nothing ever happened to them that was easy, Stiles was erased from her Lydia’s memory, from Scott’s, from his father’s, from the whole pack’s.
> 
> But again, their love overcame this obstacle. The twining, twisted thread between them kept their souls aware of each other, kept Lydia aware that she was missing someone. It drove her to find him, and find him she did, a boy that she found more than a decade ago, a boy that would be hers whole and entire for as long as she would have him.
> 
> It still took time for the pieces of their jagged, broken hearts to realign and fit together. But once it did, it was as effortless as a whispered breath, a quiet sigh. Something small and tender that only they knew the entirety of it.

 

She closes the notebook as the last word she spoke echoed in the air between them, carried by the wind rustling the trees, heard by the sun in its peak in the sky.

“That’s it,” she says to him, fingertips absentmindedly running along the cover of the orange-and-blue notebook.

“That’s not the whole story, though is it?” His eyes seem to peruse her soul, as if she is a book with an infinite number of pages he has read, and would read again.

“No, no, no it’s not.”

He grins then. “Well, can you tell me more?”

She bites her lip in thought. “Stiles and Lydia married at sunrise on a beach, after three years of being officially together, but in all honesty, it had been more than a decade of love.”

She looks away from him for a while. “They have three children, two girls and one boy, who were the absolute treasure of their parents’ hearts. They have grandchildren, whom they doted on and cherished and adored.”

Tears press against the backs of her eyes and up her throat but she continues. “They awakened to mornings spent in each other’s arms, and slept each night tangled together, hearts and souls touching.”

She whispers, soft, “And she loves him so much, she wonders how her heart could contain it. But she does, and—and—and she always will.”She cannot stop the pair of teardrops that fall from her eyes.

A pair of thumbs brush under her eyes, and he quietly murmurs, “Oh, Lyds.” The invisible thread between them stretches and releases, the tangles untangling. Lydia meets Stiles’ eyes slowly.

“Stiles, you remember me.” Her tone is awed, reverential. It breaks his heart to remember that he forgets her. It breaks his soul to know that he hurts her, day after day, for the hope of a day where he does remember.

“Yes, Lyds, I remember you. I love you.”

She turns her head towards his hand and brushes her lips against his palm. “For now, you remember me.” _But not forever._ Her unspoken words hang in the air.

Tears spill from Stiles’ eyes as well. He goes to hold her hands, gripping them, similar to a night from a lifetime ago, where they sat in Stiles’ car, fearing that he was going to be taken away.

“Remember,” he begins, “remember how you’re the first girl I’ve ever danced with?”

Lydia cries openly now. She nods, smiling through her tears.

“Remember how I had a crush on you freshman year, sophomore year, junior year?”

“Remember when I asked you to be my girlfriend? You climbed in my lap and said, ‘It’s about time.’”

“Remember when I asked you to marry me? Everything seemed to go wrong with the romantic dinner I planned, but you said yes anyway. You made me the happiest man in the universe that day. You make me the happiest man in the universe every day.”

“Remember when you gave birth to our kids? When I held them for the first time? You gave me the greatest gift by giving me a family, Lyds, our family.”

“Remember when you finally got your Fields Medal? I knew you always would, even when you doubted yourself.”

“Remember the nights in our bed, the mornings waking up with each other, the days with our kids?”

“Remember how I never tire of saying I love you? And how I never tire of hearing you say it to me back?” 

He presses his forehead against hers. “Lydia Stilinski,” he breathes. 

“Remember I love you.”


End file.
